Studio DEEN why u do dis?

I just watched some 1080p BD rips of the Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku Hen (aka Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal) OAV. I'd not seen it since years ago when all I had was a crappy 320x240 MPEG-1 encode that was probably ripped from a VHS or something. So besides being every bit as great an anime as I remembered, it also looked absolutely gorgeous — or at least the parts that were cel animated did.

See, the problem with this OAV is that, while most of it was animated with cels and mastered on film — which usually results in sharp and detailed video when scanned to create a digital master for a BD release since film has a much higher resolution than 1080p — parts of it were animated digitally. And because it was made in 1999, that digital animation was done in SD since consumer HD formats didn't exist back then. Thus, you get beautiful HD scenes one moment, then ugly upscaled scenes the next.

I'm sure most people probably won't care, but being a bit of a videophile, the sudden switching back and forth between pretty HD and ugly upscale was jarring for me. Honestly, I think it's the worst thing about the OAV as I can't find fault in it anywhere else. (No, seriously, it's a classic that any anime fan should see. If you've been living under a rock and somehow haven't watched it yet, you should.) More annoying still was the fact that more and more scenes are digitally animated as the OAV goes on. There are only a few short scenes in the first of the four episodes that are digitally animated, but by the last one, large portions are.

This makes me want to get the BD and do my own encode so I could apply filtering to make the upscaled sections less ugly. While it's impossible to make them as pretty as real HD, it would hopefully make the switch between them less jarring. But I've already got plenty of other things to occupy my spare time, so who knows if I'll ever get around to it.

Life: 09/22/11 | By: Desbreko | 5 comments | Tags: anime, encoding, rurouni kenshin

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